‘It looks as if he went out of his own free will,’ I said. ‘And he didn’t mean to come back. Had he money?’
‘I gave him five pounds in gold yesterday. To keep his mouth shut about last night and … and about the other thing. Alderley, I mean. Which brings me to the worst of it. When I—’
The servant chose this moment to enter with the next bottle, followed by the boy from the cookshop with a tray of covered dishes containing our supper. Milcote and I waited in strained silence while they prepared the table.
When they left us alone at last, Milcote stared at the food before us, a look of distaste on his face. ‘I find I have no appetite, sir. But may I help you to a leg of—’
‘What were you going to tell me just then?’
He looked across the table at me. ‘I believe I made a terrible mistake with Gorse. I was wrong to trust the man.’
‘Because he’s fled?’
‘No, it’s worse than that. Much worse. When I searched his box, I found an old pair of shoes with holes in the soles.’ Milcote put his hand around the bottle as if for support. ‘He’d stuffed paper into the toes to hold their shape. I don’t know why, but I pulled the papers out. One was just an old broadsheet. The other was a note of instructions from a former master, nothing of significance in itself, a list of errands. But it was signed “EA”.’
‘You think it was Alderley?’
Milcote nodded. ‘I’m certain of it.’
‘Why?’
‘He had a way of putting little flourishes on the “E” and the “A” of his name. He gave me a note of hand when I lent him money, and I noticed it then.’
I rested my elbows on the table and leaned closer to him. ‘I don’t understand. Are you saying that Alderley had once been Gorse’s master? Yet they pretended not to know each other?’
‘Yes. And it was Gorse who found his body in the well, and Gorse who helped us move him last night.’
For an instant, I glimpsed another possibility, like a big fish moving in the depths of a murky pond, far beneath its smaller brethren near the surface. I said, ‘Perhaps the steward at Clarendon House can tell us more about his background?’
‘I’ve already enquired about that. One of my lady’s friends had suggested him as a well-trained and trustworthy servant.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. And Lady Clarendon is in her grave.’ Milcote waved his arm, as if to point out its location. ‘There’s no one to ask. No one. No one at all.’
‘Then who is truly Gorse’s master?’ I asked. ‘Not my Lord Clarendon, obviously, for all he paid the fellow’s wages. Was it Alderley still? But you can’t serve a dead man, can you? So …’
‘He … He might have run away. Servants do, after all.’
‘Or,’ I said, ‘he might have left Clarendon House because his real master commanded him to do so.’
‘His real master …’ Milcote repeated slowly.
He stared at me across the table, his handsome face flushed and haggard. I took the wine from him and refilled our glasses. We both drank.
‘I’ve faced an enemy on a field of battle more than once, and counted it no more than my duty.’ His voice was quiet and steady now, with no trace of the wine he had drunk. ‘I’ve fought a duel over a lady, because her honour was involved, and therefore I was obliged to defend her for the sake of her good name. But this – this is different. This shapeless, creeping dread. I can’t face the danger because I don’t know what it is or where it lies.’
By the time we left the Goat, both of us were a long way from sobriety. Milcote seemed to have little control over his limbs, which struck him as intensely humorous.
‘The truth is, my dear Marwood, I am most dreadfully foxed.’
‘I can’t say I’m altogether clear-headed myself. Let’s summon a chair to take you back.’
In vino veritas, they say – when a man is drunk, you discover the truth of him; you see him as he really is, stripped of caution and calculation. From that perspective, I found much to like in Milcote: he seemed open, honourable; even when drunk, he was unfailingly courteous, and he treated me without a hint of condescension.
There was a stand for sedan chairs at Charing Cross. I summoned one and helped Milcote into it with some difficulty. I told the chairmen to take him the short distance to Clarendon House, and paid them generously in advance.
By the time this was settled, and Milcote had made his last farewells to me and dozed off on the seat inside the chair, I felt more myself again. The fresh air and the exertion hadn’t made me sober but they had counteracted some of the more extreme effects of the wine. I set off home on foot – the Savoy was even closer than Piccadilly.
As I walked, my temporary good humour ebbed away with the fumes of the sack. Before he had entered Lord Clarendon’s service, Gorse had worked for Alderley. Neither of them had seen fit to mention that to Milcote or anyone else. Why? It suggested that there had been a conspiracy between them.
I turned off the Strand and passed under the archway that led down to the Savoy. It was darker here, and the stones were slippery. A mist was rising from the river, its tendrils softening the shadowy outlines of the buildings. With the mist came the stink of sewage; the smells were always worse at low tide when much of the foreshore was exposed.
Here and there, lights surrounded by blurred halos showed in windows or above gateways. I walked more slowly and carefully than usual, though the way was as familiar to me as the passages and stairs of my own house. The tapping of my stick on the stones sounded muffled.
Something from our conversation in the Goat snagged in my memory, but too far beneath the surface for me to retrieve it. I struggled with it for a moment, but I could not identify what it was.
‘Mr Marwood, sir?’
The voice was little more than a whisper. It came from my right, where there was a narrow passage between two buildings; it was usually the haunt of beggars during the day, especially if it was raining.
I stopped and turned towards the sound. The path was as black as a pool of ink.
‘Mr Marwood?’
The voice was low-pitched and gravelly.
‘Who are you?’ I said, taking a firmer grip of my stick and raising it, ready to use it as a cudgel.
‘A friend, sir, a friend.’ The man cleared his throat. ‘My master would speak with you.’
‘Then let him come to me by day.’
‘Now, sir. He’s but a step away. He—’
The crack of a latch made him break off. The sound came from the gateway further down the alley on the left that led to that part of the Savoy set aside for private lodgings, including my own.
The wicket opened. In the dim light that hung above the gate I saw the blurred shape of a man coming out into the alley. He was carrying a small lantern. I heard the familiar tap of a crutch on the stones.
‘Sam,’ I cried. ‘Sam – is that you?’
‘Aye, master. Come to light you home.’
Relief washed over me. ‘You there,’ I said, suddenly bold. ‘Show yourself.’
All I heard in reply were retreating footsteps.
A moment later, Sam drew level. ‘Were you talking to someone?’
‘Yes.’ I waved the stick towards the passage. ‘A man over there. He wanted to take me to his master.’
‘Big man?’ Sam said. ‘Belly like an alderman’s? Carrying a big old sword?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see him at all. His voice was full of phlegm.’
‘He came to the house a few minutes ago. Wanted to see you, late though it is. An ugly fellow – I wouldn’t let him in. Talked to him through the shutter.’
Sam lowered the lantern, and for a moment its light touched the butt of the pistol in his belt.
‘What are you doing out here, anyway?’ I asked.
He turned his head and spat. ‘Came to see if you were about. I didn’t take to him.’
I felt guilty for my earlier thoughts of Sam, my dark susp
icion that he would return home drunk as a lord and useless to anyone. If anyone was drunk and useless, I was.
We walked back to the house in silence. Big man, I thought, with a belly like an alderman’s and carrying an old sword. Sam’s description sounded disturbingly like the fat man whom Milcote thought was one of those conducting the protests outside Clarendon House.
Sam knocked at Infirmary Close, and Margaret unbarred the door to us. She said nothing but her eyes moved from me to Sam and back again, inspecting us for signs of damage. Candle in hand, she followed us into the parlour.
‘Are you hungry, sir?’
‘No. Go to bed.’ I wanted to be alone. ‘Both of you.’
Sam cleared his throat. ‘I’ve news, master.’
I wheeled to face him. ‘You’ve found Mistress Lovett?’
He came forward into the circle of light thrown by the candle. ‘Not sure. Brennan went out this afternoon, and he was carrying a sack. Big enough for the cloak. I followed him.’ He glanced down at his wooden leg. ‘As best I could. He went up to St Giles and left the sack at that little tavern by the church.’
I sat down abruptly. It looked as if we had been right. In the ordinary way, Brennan would surely have sent out the porter’s boy to take a parcel. But not if he had been sending something to Cat, and hadn’t wanted it known. ‘What happened then?’
‘Brennan came out of the tavern without the sack,’ Sam said. ‘So I went in. And there was that pedlar, the one you mentioned, who brought that letter. The one with the squinty eye. He had Brennan’s sack on the floor at his feet. He was drinking, and then so was I, and he was grumbling that he had to go out of town today, and it looked like rain. A special trip, he said, and at least it paid well. God, I said, you poor devil, and Squinty said luckily he was only going as far as Woor Green, matter of five or six miles, so it could be worse.’
‘Woor Green? Where’s that?’
‘On the way to St Albans. It’s a village by the high road.’ Sam paused for effect. ‘I heard there’s a refugee camp up there. I reckon that’s where she is.’
‘You’ve done well,’ I said. ‘I shall rise early in the morning. Call me at five.’
‘Wait, master – there’s more, and maybe it’ll make you change your plans.’ Sam came closer to me. ‘I came back by Henrietta Street and whetted my thirst at the alehouse in case … in case Brennan was up to anything else. Just as well I did. Did you know they’ve found Mr Alderley drowned in a pond near Tyburn? They say he’d been beaten and robbed.’
‘Yes,’ I said in a colourless voice. ‘I believe I had heard the news.’
Sam cocked an eyebrow. ‘You take it mighty calmly, sir. Phlegmatically, sir, as the learned gentlemen say.’
‘Don’t be impudent. I take it how I please.’
He had my measure, and he grinned. ‘And I heard another thing there too, master, which perhaps you don’t know. Brennan’s gone.’
‘What do you mean – gone? Run off?’
‘No – he’s been taken up for questioning. They were waiting for him when he got back to Henrietta Street. There’s no one left in the Drawing Office.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I was up and about as soon as it was light. There was no time to be lost. Brennan had been arrested. I didn’t doubt his attachment to Cat, though I disliked it intensely because I thought her far above him. But I was doubtful of his ability to withstand expert interrogation at Scotland Yard. It was probably only a matter of time before they forced him to reveal all he knew.
I hired a horse for four shillings from the livery stable at the Mitre. Williamson wasn’t expecting to see me at Scotland Yard, or Chiffinch until ten in the evening. There was a fair chance that I could safely devote the day to my own business without anyone being the wiser.
The trouble was, Cat was Chiffinch’s business too, for a different reason. I was playing a double game, with all the dangers that entailed. And there would have been no necessity for this dangerous expedition if Cat had taken me into her confidence.
The day was fine, with the promise of heat later on. I rode north up Watling Street in the direction of St Albans. My head was thick from last night’s wine, but it began to clear once I left the stink and noise of London behind.
I didn’t often ride and I lacked great skill in it. Managing the horse took up most of my attention. The keeper of the stables had assured me that the mare had a placid, biddable nature – ‘Why, sir, your lady mother could safely ride her from here to John O’Groats without mishap’ – and for the first few hundred yards his claim seemed justified. The beast plodded through the streets, allowing me to guide her with the utmost docility.
Once we reached the open road, however, she became altogether less manageable. She showed a tendency to shy at animals we encountered along the way, and a positive aversion to barking dogs. Moreover, her appetite grew as we left the city behind, and she would stray to the roadside for a mouthful or two of grass or anything else that took her fancy. I tugged at her reins but it seemed to have little effect; she ate what she wanted and then pottered onwards of her own accord.
After an hour or so, I suspected I had passed Woor Green without knowing it, for there were no fingerposts on this stretch of the way. I asked a man labouring in a hayfield by the side of the high road.
‘Woor Green, master?’ he said, leaning on his rake. ‘Why do you want to go there, and you a gentleman and all?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ I asked, accepting his flattery and recognizing it as a discreet appeal to my generosity.
‘Terrible place since the refugees came. They’d slit your throat for sixpence.’
He gave me directions, nevertheless. I had indeed missed the turning, which was a mile back. The village, he said, lay a few hundred yards west of the high road, though the cottages were so mean and scattered that you would hardly know it was a village.
‘I’m looking for the camp,’ I said. ‘What’s it like? Why’s it so bad?’
After the Fire, the camps around London had housed the refugees in their tens of thousands. But most of the refugees had moved out of them now, and those that remained had become like small towns, with their own streets and regulations.
‘It’s not like the others, master,’ the labourer told me with relish. He was a garrulous man, delighted to have an audience. He explained that the Woor Green camp was very small, with a shifting population of only a few score families. Its retired situation made it harder for the refugees who sheltered there to find work nearby, and London was too far away for them to walk there and back every day. Most subsisted on what they could scratch from the soil, or beg or steal, or on the charity of families and kindly neighbours. These were refugees who had lost all they had to the flames. In most cases, they had lost the will to improve their lot even if they could.
The camp was on land belonging to an old farmer named Mangot, who had let the place decay since his wife died. Soldiers had been billeted there during the war, and they had done a good deal of damage. Mangot had had one son who survived into adulthood, but he had died a few years ago.
I gave the labourer the wherewithal to drink my gentlemanly health and rode back the way I had come. A rutted lane led to the village, such as it was. I came across an old woman picking blackberries from a hedgerow. The eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. Her skin was brown, with a single fissure on either side of the mouth, so deep it might have been slashed with a knife. While the mare took a few mouthfuls of the vegetation underneath the hedge, I asked her where I might find Mr Mangot and the camp. She gave me a sour look and pointed a grimy forefinger further up the lane.
When the mare had eaten its fill, I rode on. The lane narrowed and sank lower between the adjacent fields. The hedgerows became more and more unkempt. The air smelled of decaying vegetable matter.
Two dogs came at me from nowhere, circling around me, snarling, snapping at my legs. The horse grew restive, backing away and weaving to and fro
in the confined space. At any moment, I knew, she could rear up, and I would probably fall off the damned animal. I swore at the dogs and shouted for help.
‘Here, you devils.’
The voice was a man’s, sharp and high pitched. It came from someone standing above and behind me. The dogs cowered, their tails down, and slid up the bank at the side of the path. The hedge was in such poor condition that I could see through it to the outline of a thin figure on the field beside the path.
‘Mr Mangot?’ I said.
‘Who wants him?’
‘My name is’ – I plucked from memory an old schoolfellow at St Paul’s – ‘Rawlindale.’
‘Why do you want him?’
‘To ask about the young woman who came to this camp a day or two ago. I want to speak to her.’
‘Who?’
I didn’t know what name Cat was using. I said, ‘She had a cloak sent to her yesterday.’
‘You’d better come with me. I’m Mangot.’
A small man wriggled through the fence and slithered down the bank to the lane with the dogs behind him. He was a wiry fellow with a tangle of long, greasy grey hair and eyes filmed with infection. He wore a filthy smock and filthier breeches. Without a word, he fumbled at the wretched horse until he found her bridle. Limping, he led us up the lane. The dogs followed. I felt like a captive in a triumphal procession, not a visitor.
We came to an open space, where there was a tumbledown farmhouse with a sagging roof green with age; a third of it had fallen, exposing broken rafters and leaning trusses. A small pig was rooting for its dinner in the muddy, weed-strewn farmyard. There was no other sign of life apart from a nanny goat tethered to a ring set in the barn wall beside a moss-encrusted mounting block.
The man made a growling sound in his throat and the dogs lowered their tails and ran into a barn attached to the ruinous end of the house. ‘There,’ he said, pointing to a parcel of land behind the yard that sloped down to a stream. ‘That’s the camp.’
I had been to refugee camps before but nothing had prepared me for Woor Green, even the warnings from the labourer I had met on the road. Beyond the buildings of the farm was a chaotic collection of canvas tents and makeshift cabins built of wood. There were no makeshift shops or streets in this place. Wisps of smoke rose from half a dozen fires. Figures moved among the shelters. The colours – of the tents, the clothes of the inhabitants, of the ground around them – were shades of brown: the colours of sackcloth and dishwater, of mud and excrement.
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